vaccines
oracknows | February 6, 2013On the one hand, I'm seriously tempted to get out the popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show that is the internecine conflict going on in the antivaccine movement right now. On the other hand, as bizarre as it sounds, I actually do feel a bit sorry for the main combatant, Jake Crosby. He's the guy whom I likened to an antivaccine Frankenstein's monster turning on his creators last week. The reason was that Jake had become very, very unhappy with the antivaccine leaders who created him, or at least who created the blogging phenomenon that is Jake Crosby, Internet Detective and Disher of Dirt.…
sa smith | February 6, 2013I recently got to chat with the guys of Skeptiles this weekend about viruses, vaccines/anti-vaxers, HIV, HepC, Creationists-- We were all over the place, and it was so much fun!
Skeptiles: Episode 21 – Abbie Smith
oracknows | February 4, 2013Gary Null loves me! He really loves me!
Well, maybe not Gary Null, but Sayer Ji. You remember Sayer Ji, don't you? He's the guy who runs GreenMedInfo.com who showed up on my skeptical radar when he claimed that vaccines are "transhumanism" that subverts evolution. (Seriously, you can't make stuff like this up.) On another occasion, he attacked Bill Gates for funding projects to monitor the antivaccine movement, and went wild attacking such activities as though they were a bad thing. Most recently, Ji launched a spectacularly inept attack on evidence-based medicine in which he tried to…
oracknows | February 1, 2013Almost everyone knows the story of Victor Frankenstein and his monster. It's such a classic tale that has been around so long and told so many times in so many ways that it's almost impossible for someone living in this country not to have encountered it growing up. Frankenstein's monster is also a tale that strikes me as an excellent metaphor for something that I witnessed that puzzled the hell out of me the other day, because, as everyone knows, during the tale the monster ultimately turns on its master, wreaking its revenge by killing people Victor loves and, depending on the telling,…
sa smith | January 31, 2013I wish I wish I wish this article was open access! ARG!!
Gene therapy clinical trials worldwide to 2012 - an update
This article is a great review of gene therapy as a therapy, and how it has evolved from an experiment that killed children to an accepted therapy that is saving and improving lives.
Here is a list of all the diseases that have been/are/will be treated with gene therapy:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23355455
These are trials in humans-- this list doesnt include all of the therapies that are still in the tissue culture/animal model segments of the pipeline. Can anyone…
oracknows | January 22, 2013Way back in the day, when I was a newbie at countering the mass of hysterical pseudoscience that is the antivaccine movement, particularly the myth that vaccines cause autism, a blogger by the 'nym of Prometheus taught me that autism and autism spectrum disorders (particularly by antivaccinationists and believers in the quackery known as "autism biomed") are conditions of developmental delay, not developmental stasis. Autistic children can and do exhibit improvement in their symptoms simply through growth and development. However, parents who subject their children to "autism biomed" quackery…
sa smith | January 18, 2013Crazy random happenstance considering the post earlier this week on 'religious' vegans refusing the influenza vaccine in hospitals:
Flublok, a Flu Vaccine, Wins F.D.A. Approval
The vaccine, developed by a small company called Protein Sciences, is made with a process that does not require the virus to be grown in chicken eggs, as is now generally done.
I had no idea this was in the works-- No insider info, just great news, for vegans, people with egg allergies, and YOU!
Some folks figured out a way to make The Flu Vaccine (a mix of three different influenza variants) in an insect cell line.…
oracknows | January 17, 2013I sense another disturbance in the antivaccine Force.
Yes, I realize that it was just a couple of days ago that I sensed a previous disturbance rippling through the antivaccine Force. That's when antivaccinationists brought David Kirby out of mothballs from whatever journalistic slime pit he's currently residing in to use every trick at his disposal to convince you that somehow the government has compensated two families of children for vaccine-induced autism when in fact he's playing the same game he's always played: Claiming that if any child who's ever been compensated by the National…
oracknows | January 16, 2013This is going to be uncharacteristically short, for me that is. I sometimes listen to NPR as I drive home from work, and I happened to be doing just that yesterday evening when I heard a story about the new Institute of Medicine report on vaccines and the vaccine schedule. (Stay tuned for my post on that in a few hours.) The report was crisp and summarized the findings of the report quite well. Then, at around what I know to be the three minute mark (now that the audio is up) I heard something most dismaying. Yes, believe it or not, for the "other side" of an issue for which there is no other…
sa smith | January 16, 2013I will give them this-- This is a new anti-vax argument for me:
Like most medical facilities, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital appears to require that all of its employees receive an annual flu shot. It fired Sakile Chenzira, a customer service representative, for refusing to comply. Chenzira sued, claiming that because the flu vaccine contains eggs the requirement violated her religion—veganism—which prohibits the ingestion of any animals or animal by-products.
The influenza vaccine is produced in eggs. If youre vegan, this might present an ethical problem, for you. But most people are vegans…
oracknows | January 14, 2013I sense a disturbance in the antivaccine Force, which is, of course, by definition the Dark Side.
Whenever I sense such a disturbance, there are a number of possible reactions that it provokes in me. One such reaction is alarm, as when antivaccine activists say something that is just clever enough to sound plausible enough that it might cause trouble. It never is, of course, but it often takes a close reading and some research to figure out what the game is and deconstruct the nonsense. Sometimes, my reaction is amusement, as when an antivaccine activist says something that is so hilariously…
sa smith | January 14, 2013After I put my post up on this years influenza fiasco on Friday, the CDC declared it an official 'epidemic'. Since one of the main excuses for not getting the shot this year are “It’s a hassle.”/“Number one, I’m lazy” (UUUUUUUGH THAT WAS ME TOO! GET THE SHOT!! The flu SUCKED!!!!), I thought it would be a good time to repost an article I wrote last year. You should get the vaccine, if not for you, for the people around you.
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EMAIL! (technically, a paraphrased really great question from someone at FreeOK!)
Dear ERV--
Is there any reason why I, a young healthy adult…
sa smith | January 11, 2013My boss and I are very busy people. Weve got big stuff going on. BIG STUFF. So we didnt have time to get the free flu shots the university offered like 500 times last fall.
About three weeks ago--
Bossman: Meh, Im feeling kinda sniffly. Im gonna go get pho for lunch.
Me: Cool! Im going to stay here and work through lunch like a good grad student *angel halo shines*
(about an hour later, Bossman is hacking and coughing)
Bossman: I still feel like crap. Im going home.
Me: Okay! Feel better!
Later that night--
Email from Bossman: Im not coming in tomorrow. 103 degree temp
Email from me: Okay…
oracknows | December 24, 2012I certainly don't even try to keep secret my opinion of Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist who is almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the measles back to the UK, thanks to his bad science, for which he was well-paid by trial lawyers and his falsification of data and scientific fraud. Since 1998, when Wakefield first published his fraudulent (and now retracted) little case series in The Lancet, his work and his personality have dominated the antivaccine movement in the UK. After he moved to Texas to ply his antivaccine quackery here in the US, he soon became a…
oracknows | December 21, 2012Quacks despise science-based medicine in general, but there are certain specialties that they detest more than others. Arguably, the specialty most attacked by quacks is psychiatry. Many are the reasons, some legitimate, many not. In particular, Scientologists despise psychiatry, even going so far as to maintain a "museum" dedicated to psychiatry that they charmingly call Psychiatry: Industry of Death. It's so ridiculously over-the-top, a virtual self-parody, that it almost inadvertently undermines attacks on psychiatry frequently leveled by Scientologists and quacks.
Let's face it,…
oracknows | December 20, 2012Some antivaccine (and quack, but I repeat myself) tropes come up time and time again, and I've blogged about them time and time again. Obviously, at times this can get a bit repetitive, particularly when I've been blogging nearly every day for eight years. On the other hand, even after eight years, I still regularly come across new variants (almost always mixed with the old, naturally) of common quack and antivaccine (but I repeat myself again) tropes. After having written about such topics so many times over so many years, I sometimes wonder if I'm getting through to my readers. So I decided…
oracknows | December 18, 2012One of the oldest topics I've dealt with on this blog, a topic that I've been writing about on and off (unfortunately, mostly on) about the antivaccine movement. Ever since I first discovered about a decade ago that, yes, there are people ignorant enough about science and medicine that they actually think that vaccines are harmful and cause autism, as well as actually believing that it is a good idea not to vaccinate their children against even deadly diseases like the measles, polio, Haemophilus influenzae type B (HiB), and more. As a group, hiding behind the risible claim that they are "not…
sa smith | December 18, 2012Thanks to this, we now have this:
Five female health workers vaccinating children against polio have been shot dead in Pakistan in a series of attacks blamed on Islamist militants. One victim was a 17-year-old schoolgirl volunteer.
...
... Pakistan, where there has been a severe backlash against immunisation for polio and other diseases since the CIA used a Pakistani doctor, Shakil Afridi, to set up a fake vaccination programme as the agency closed in on the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in his hiding place in the town of Abbottabad, in the north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, last…
oracknows | November 23, 2012Whenever I blog about atrocities against science like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I'm frequently asked how just such an edifice designed to promote pseudoscience could have come to be as a full-fledged center in the National Institutes of Health. The answer is simple and boils down to woo-loving legislators. In the case of NCCAM, the primary driving force to create it, promote it from an office (originally the Office of Unconventional Medicine and then later renamed the Office of Alternative Medicine) to a full center, and protect it from all…
oracknows | November 19, 2012As I looked over the ol' blog last night, I was shocked to realize that I haven't blogged about the antivaccine movement and its offenses against science in nearly three weeks. That's right! The last time I did a vaccine post was when I examined a particularly egregiously bad paper from a couple of scientists who have drunk deeply of the antivaccine Kool Aid and as a result are trying to blame the HPV vaccine Gardasil for the death of an 18-year-old woman in Australia and a 14-year-old girl in Quebec. It's amazing but true. Rarely do I go that long without antivaccine pseudoscience attracting…